Ketanji Brown Jackson, a liberal appeals court judge, won enough support to secure her confirmation to the supreme court on Thursday, overcoming a rancorous Senate approval process to become the first Black woman to serve as a justice on the high court in its more than 200 -year history.
After weeks of private meetings and days of public testimony, marked by intense sparring over judicial philosophy and personal reflections on race in America, Jackson’s nomination crossed the 50-vote threshold in the Senate on Thursday afternoon, virtually guaranteeing her confirmation.
Jackson, who currently serves on the US court of appeals for the DC Circuit, will replace Justice Stephen Breyer, 83, the most senior member of the court’s liberal bloc. Breyer, for whom Jackson clerked early in his legal career, said he intends to retire from the court this summer.
At 51, Jackson is young enough to serve on the court for decades. Her ascension of her, however, will do little to tilt the ideological balance of the high court, dominated by a 6-3 conservative majority.
Shortly before the final vote, Kyrsten Sinema announced she would vote yes on Jackson’s nomination, ensuring that all 50 Democratic senators would support confirmation.
“Judge Jackson brings to the bench a wealth of knowledge, more trial court experience than all other current supreme court justices combined, a commitment to respect precedent, and a proven independent, pragmatic approach to judicial decisions,” Sinema said.
“Judge Jackson has exceptional qualifications and will serve our country well in the years to come.”
Ahead of the vote, three Senate Republicans – Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine – indicated they would back Jackson’s nomination. Their support was a welcome result for the White House, which had been attempted on securing a bipartisan confirmation.
Assailing Jackson’s record, but acknowledging Republicans did not have the votes to stop her confirmation, minority leader Mitch McConnell implored the judge to embrace the textualist approach of conservative justices.
“The soon-to-be justice can either satisfy her radical fan club or help preserve the judiciary that Americans need, but not both,” McConnell said ahead of the vote on Thursday. “I’m afraid the nominee’s record tells us which is likely, but I hope judge Jackson proves me wrong.”
Her confirmation to the lifetime post represents the fulfillment of a promise Biden made to his supporters at the nadir of his 2020 campaign for president, when he vowed to nominate the first Black woman to the supreme court, if elected president and a vacancy arose. The opportunity presented itself earlier this year, at another low point for Biden, with momentous domestic and foreign challenges weighing on his presidency.
During the public hearings, Jackson vowed to be an independent justice who would seek to ensure that the words inscribed on the marbled supreme court building – Equal Justice Under the Law – were a “reality and not just an ideal”. With her parents and daughters present, Jackson recounted for the Senate judiciary committee her family’s generational journey de ella, as the daughter of public school teachers raised in the segregated south who would rise to become a justice on a court that once denied Black Americans citizenship.
Yet any hope by the White House that Jackson’s historic nomination might defuse some of the bitter partisanship that senators lament has turned the process into a “circus” quickly evaporated.
With an eye to the November midterm elections, Republicans led an aggressive campaign against the judge during her confirmation hearings and in conservative media, raising questions about her record in an effort to paint her as an “activist judge” who is soft on crime. They used the confirmation proceedings to air conservative grievances about past supreme court nominations and to wage culture war battles over critical race theory, crime and transgender women in sports.
Couched in thinly coded appeals to racism and the far-right fringes with nods to the QAnon conspiracy theory, some Republicans accused Jackson of being too lenient on child sexual abuse offenders, claims she forcefully rebutted “as a mother and a judge”. Legal experts have said her decisions in such criminal cases were within the mainstream while independently fact checkers concluded that the attacks were misleading and a distortion of her record.
Democrats, and the handful of Republicans who supported her, praised her qualifications and demeanor, and in particular the restraint she showed during some stinging exchanges with conservative senators. They sought to defend her record, noting that her sentencing record was within the mainstream of the federal judiciary, while emphasizing the support she had earned from within the legal community, including among conservative justices, and her endorsement from the Fraternal Order of Police, which cited her family’s law enforcement background.
In a mark of just how polarizing the process of confirming a supreme court nominee has become, the Senate judiciary committee deadlocked along party lines over her nomination. The resulting tie prompted Democrats to execute a rare procedural maneuver to “discharge” her nomination of her from the committee to the floor, with a vote by the full Senate. The NAACP said the vote by 11 Republicans against Jackson’s nomination was a “stain” on the committee.
A graduate of Harvard and Harvard Law School, Jackson served on the independent US sentencing commission, an agency that develops sentencing guidelines, before becoming a federal judge.
While she shares an elite background with the other justices, her work as a public defender sets her apart. The last justice with experience representing criminal defendants was Thurgood Marshall, the towering civil rights lawyer who became the first Black member of the supreme court.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism